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Pink Panthers' global trail glitters with jewels

PARIS — Their timing was as impeccable as a tourbillon watch, a luxury timepiece whose name means whirlwind.

And after the diamond thieves disguised in women's wigs and flowing foulards had vanished, police detectives on several continents pondered a trail of more than €100 million in jewelry heists over the last four years and wondered whether the so-called Pink Panthers had struck again.

The whirlwind started near closing time, a favorite moment for diamond thieves to strike. As the second hand ticked, four men - three dressed as women with long blonde tresses, sunglasses and winter scarves - stood in front of an intercom and demurely requested to enter the deluxe Harry Winston jewelry store on Avenue Montaigne. It was a chilly evening within the golden triangle of boutiques that includes Dior, Chanel and Gucci, the ornate facades and trees resplendent with Christmas lights.

Buzzed in, the men rolled a small valise on wheels into the hushed inner refuge. Then they pulled out a hand grenade and a .357 Magnum. As Parisians strolled unawares past the store's wrought-iron gates, the robbers smashed display cases and barked out orders - and the names of some of the Harry Winston employees. They spoke French with strong Slavic accents.

There was no time for officers from a nearby police station in the luxury district to rush over. In less than 15 minutes, the jewel thieves were gone, roaring away in a waiting car through the 5:30 p.m. twilight with sacks of emeralds, rubies, and chunky diamonds the size of tiny birds' eggs - the lot valued at more than €80 million.

The robbers may not have been suave celluloid jewel thieves with the charm of David Niven - aka Sir Charles Litton, the debonair phantom bandit of the original Pink Panther film - but their meticulous planning, swift execution and creative style quickly raised suspicions that the Harry Winston heist was the handiwork of a loose global network of battle-hardened former soldiers and their relatives from the former Yugoslavia.

Investigators, marveling at the gang's ingenuity, have dubbed this unlikely network the Pink Panthers. The parallels between film and reality are perhaps best summed up in the fractured accent and words of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau himself, from the original 1963 movie: "In a strange way," he said of his nemesis, the phantom bandit, "I admire him, for he has a unique flair for the dramatic."

The Pink Panthers - many of whose grim Interpol wanted posters show they come from the town of Nis in southern Serbia - have been roving the world's luxury capitals since at least 2003 on reconnaissance missions for hard diamonds that can be, in the parlance of luxury security specialists, "soft targets."

Defense lawyers for some thieves who have been arrested insist that membership in the Pink Panthers is an invention of drama-loving law enforcement authorities. But investigators say that there are about 200 members in the group, linked by village and blood, and that the Pink Panthers have scooped up jewels worth more than $130 million in bold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco.

The group's members live all over Europe, with some working in mundane jobs as hospital cleaners, waiting to be summoned for the next discount flight to a foreign capital, investigators said. And the group's leadership is loose and unstructured.

When cornered they fight hard; one Pink Panther fugitive escaped from a French prison in 2005 by sliding down a ladder while his friends raked a watchtower with machine-gun fire.

In Paris, investigators are weighing all the possibilities - including the return, literally, of the Pink Panthers.

"Of course there is a hypothesis that it is the Pink Panthers, but we cannot at this stage say absolutely that it is them," said Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor's office. It was the second major robbery at the same store in the last year. "We're open to all theories," she said.

The risk adjusters and syndicates associated with Lloyds of London - the Harry Winston insurer that also has a representative playing a supporting character in the original Pink Panther movie - harbor the same suspicions. They have placed strategic classified advertisements all over the world, including in the former Yugoslavia, to publicize a $1 million reward for information that might lead to the recovery of the Harry Winston sparklers.

The nature of their suspicions is underlined by the fact that in France they have placed a classified notice in a local daily, Le Parisien, instead of one of the country's grand newspapers like Le Monde. The newspaper reaches the working-class outskirts, the banlieue of Paris where the adjusters suspect that many of the professional thieves may live or have family.

France is already home - if a cold jail cell can be called home - for two Serbians considered by prosecutors to be former Pink Panther members, who have been blamed for robberies that reaped more than €7.5 million in jewelry from swank French boutiques in the Riviera towns of St. Tropez and Cannes and the Atlantic resort of Biarritz.

Just a day before the Harry Winston robbery, these two men - Boban Stojkovic and Goran Drazic - were sentenced respectively to sentences of 6 and 10 years in prison. Dragan Mikic, the man identified as the group's ringleader who was sprung from prison in a machine-gun attack, was sentenced in absentia to 15 years.

"Almost all of them are intelligent," remarked the prosecuting lawyer, Gilbert Lafaye, at their sentencing. "But with this intelligence, why do they follow the path to easy money?"

The fact that cool cleverness, boldness and speed are the hallmarks of the group's robberies has led investigators to speculate that the Pink Panthers are casting for ideas from movie thieves - right down to storing a signature €500,000 blue diamond in a jar of face cream, a ruse used in "The Return of the Pink Panther."

In comparison with other robberies blamed on the gang, the Harry Winston job, despite the violence - some of the workers were struck in the head - was almost subtle.

In the Gulf emirate of Dubai, masked members of the gang were alleged last year to have rammed two luxury Audi cars into the window of a Graff jewelry boutique in a gleaming Wafi City shopping mall. They scooped up $3.4 million of diamonds and then bolted away in the same cars - in a daylight heist that has become a YouTube classic with more than 200,000 hits. Later, they burned the cars to erase their traces.

It took well-dressed Pink Panthers less than three minutes to attack the Graff store in Tokyo's Ginza jewelry district in 2004 and stuff a sack with rare yellow diamonds and other loot, the brazen proceedings captured on video.

The haul: a 125-carat necklace of 116 diamonds known as the Comtesse de Vendôme, worth an estimated $31.5 million, which has never been recovered. Some suspects were later arrested and ultimately tried in Serbia under an agreement with Japan, but as with other cases attributed to the group, the thieves insisted that they didn't know where the jewels were.

In London, thieves believed to be Pink Panthers last year stepped out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley Continental and struck a jewelry store in Mayfair.

Sometime they match their brutality with cleverness. In Biarritz, for example, they coated a bench with fresh paint to deter pedestrians from resting near a jewelry store that was a soft target.

"The modus was always the same," said Olivier Jude, the commander of the police department in the tiny principality of Monaco. "Very fast, very well-organized with a plurality of perpetrators, and violent, too. The criminals used to break the shop windows most of the time with hammers."

There are more than 400 closed-circuit cameras in Monte Carlo's Casino Square, a playground for the wealthy, with designer shops including Cartier, Hermes and Louis Vuitton. But in the summer of 2007, jewelry thieves struck the Ciribelli shop, prompting the Monaco police force to request an international conference of investigators.

The conference was held a month later at Interpol headquarters in Lyon. Interpol now presides over what it calls Project Pink Panthers to share and coordinate information about the gang.

As part of that effort, Interpol started circulating the names and pictures of Pink Panthers on its so-called "red" list of fugitive criminals. One of them was Dusko Poznan, 30, whose picture shows a mournful man with dark hair and circles under his eyes, dressed in a sweater and tailored shirt.

Poznan, fluent in Russian and English and a native of Bihac, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a suspect in the Dubai robbery and in a theft in Liechtenstein. In October, Poznan drove to Monaco with another man in a rented Audi A3 and headed directly for Casino Square, the authorities said. There he was crossing the road on foot when he was hit by another car.

Initially he resisted medical treatment, according to police officers who arrived on the scene. Once he arrived at Princess Grace Hospital, an officer made the connection to the red list photo.

Both Poznan and his companion had forged passports, but insisted they were simply holiday tourists, Jude said, noting dryly that the surveillance cameras later showed that "they were exactly in the area of jewelry shops and they weren't doing their Christmas shopping."

Yet for all their daring, the thieves have been tripped up at times by smallest of details.

In Dubai, investigators retrieved DNA evidence from the fire-scorched Audi rental cars and found a mobile telephone number on the rental agreement.

That set them on the trail of Bojana Mitic, 27, a native of Nis. Her cellphone led investigators to six other suspects.

When caught, some of them have denied everything - including what appear to be their images in jewelry-store robbery photographs - while others, like Boban Stojkovic, have spoken in detail to investigators.

"I don't demand your pity," Stojkovic said as he was sentenced the day before the Harry Winston robbery in Paris. "Because I know that I have to pay for these crimes. But just leave me an open door to remake my life."

Stojkovic's attorney, Emmanuel Auvergen-Rey, said Stojkovic was an ex-soldier from the former Yugoslavia whose role it was to be the enforcer. But, he said, he had the manner of what can only be described as a gentleman bandit.

"He committed robberies with a minimum of violence," said Auvergne-Rey, who insisted that Stojkovic was not part of the Pink Panthers, which he claimed was an invention of the police. "I find him extremely sweet, extremely polite and nice."

If he was so clever, then why did he become a bandit? "Permit me to say something," Auvergne-Rey said, pausing, "It's not necessary to be an idiot to act like a fool."

Although he was arrested before the Paris job, Stojkovic described aspects of his gang's modus operandi that should help investigators. He revealed that his group would minutely observe a target for up to 10 days before striking.

Such painstaking surveillance may well have led to the decision to wear wigs at Harry Winston: women, even fake ones, glimpsed through a security camera might appear less threatening to weary workers. It could also reveal how the robbers knew some of the workers' names - other members of the team may have visited enough times to pick up identities, the authorities said.

Tom O'Neill, the president of Harry Winston who was in Paris on Thursday, said that "we are working on reopening the salon as soon as possible and we are appreciative of the work of authorities and our insurance carrier in this very unfortunate matter."

The authorities who are investigating the Dec. 4 heist will also be reviewing the robbery at the same Avenue Montaigne store just a year ago, a crime that someone now feels absurdly small - just €10 million worth of jewels.